


Ad Astra Per Aspera

by LauraEMoriarty



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Post-Reaper War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-30 19:01:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5176139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraEMoriarty/pseuds/LauraEMoriarty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was written as a response to a prompt that a friend and I came up with.</p><p>The prompt was: “Considering what happened to both of them, they’d cling to one another in the dark, and pray they’d live to see another day together.”</p><p>A post-reaper war fic, where Shep contemplates everything that happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ad Astra Per Aspera

There was a certain peace that night time brought. The elusive peace that the two broken people in the bed knew only peripherally. The type of peace brought about by war, the peace found in slumber and nights of quiet, when weapons had been put down for good. A peace that was merely an illusion, for the people in the bed were anything but at peace. Their dreams were violent, full of gunfire, explosions, and the pervasive smell of burning. Of battlefields laid to waste by reapers; whole planets destroyed with nothing left but stardust to remind the galaxy that in years and times gone by that peace had once been there, and now peace reigned again at a terrible, awful cost.

The images which flickered behind closed eyes like an old movie reel showed the massive destruction that had been the war. Flashes of gunfire, grenades going off in the distance, and the gaping maw of a cannibal as it opened its mouth and spewed reaper spawn. The remnants of reapers found abandoned, and the fear of what they might find on another planet lingered long after the war was over, and won. Like the soldiers of old, these two figures were scarred in more ways than just the physical scars could ever show. The indelible psychological scars they carried defined them; they were more than just ordinary soldiers firing guns and being ordered to charge the enemy and take the hill. They were the ones who worked tirelessly behind the scenes, ensuring that the Alliance had their men and women equipped with the intelligence needed, the ones brokering difficult treaties between former adversaries, uniting the galaxy behind them in one beautiful, final push.

She woke through the night, wondering often at the cost of winning. He woke often, remembering the months he had spent in rehabilitation. They would cling to each other like the proverbial drowning man, and know that they shared those nightmares. It wasn’t easy, readjusting to the world. They had lost friends and family, not just literally, but figuratively. There were empty chairs and empty cabins on the SSV Normandy. Reminders of those who had not made it to the other side of the war. Her long red hair, braided in a simple three-strand braid, hid the scarring which created an intricate web across her scalp—- remnants of surgery that had allowed her to live, and defy fate and the grim reaper. Nothing could come close to knowing that the entire fate of the galaxy had once rested with the red-haired woman— the lives of billions and billions.

“What if I had made the wrong choice?” Shepard wondered aloud, voicing a question to which she had no answer for. “Billions of lives dependent on my decision. No wonder Shakespeare believed that heavy the head that wears the crown. What if…” Her voice failed her, a familiar hitch in her throat. There were too many dead to list— people who should have lived if only she and her crew had got there in time.

“Shepard. You need to sleep,” Kaidan kissed her shoulder, rubbing her back in a soothing, circular fashion. The light which peeked through the bottom of the blackout curtains hinted at another morning come too soon. They always came too soon these days. Normally, morning meant that another day had come, one in which their nocturnal fears were laid to rest. But the shadows under their eyes told another story; the story of two broken soldiers trying to pick up the pieces of a post-apocalyptic world in which they were the heroes. Shepard turned her head, and smiled sadly.

“Sleep isn’t what I need.” It was a broken voice, the sound of one who had been through hell and back— the divine comedy of life. “What I need I can never have. We will never have David back, we will never have the lives that were taken too soon, the lives that are broken and hollow because their families died so that they might live.” She shrugged Kaidan’s arm away, and stood up, stretching. Her distended belly grew rounder every day— a reminder that life always found a way through the pain and misery. A flurry of kicks greeted her stretching, and an uncomfortable feeling in her lower back meant the baby had kicked her once again in the kidneys.

“We’ll get through it, Shepard. We always have.” Kaidan worried about his wife, about the regret and sorrow that seemed a black rain cloud over an otherwise cheerful sky. There were things to look forwards to, things to rejoice in, but it seemed that neither of them knew how to live. How to be civilians in a world which saw them as big goddamn heroes— to feel the accolades and applause they received was unwarranted. They were simply following orders, simply being what they had enlisted to do so long ago.

They knew Liara would outlive them. The longevity of the Asari meant that she would see her friends buried, their names become nothing more than plaques on walls, and lists of heroes. They knew how ephemeral life was, and yet they didn’t understand how to fall into a comfortable civilian routine, when all they had known for so long had been war. And war had made corpses of their friends, their families, their entire lives. It had made them corpses when the first bullets had been fired at Cerberus agents on Mars— the loss of those lives troubled Shepard— the fear of losing the man she loved had driven her at times to take vicious satisfaction in shooting the agency she had temporarily belonged to. It brought her pause in moments when she reflected on it.

She put her dressing gown on, and waddled barefoot into the bathroom, Kaidan watching her with concern. Deciding there was nothing he could do in that moment, he rolled himself out of bed. There was bacon to be cooked, tomatoes to be grilled, breakfast to be made. He told himself that this is where he could be useful, and not clucking around his pregnant wife as though she was made of porcelain. After all, even heroes needed their breakfast— you never heard of a hungry hero in mythology, or if you did, the hunger had dire consequences.

Shepard stood beneath the shower head, breathing heavily. There were unpleasant things which came back to her when the water ran. The sound of rain pounding heavily against the glass canopy under which she struggled to disassociate with the Leviathan. Everyday sounds and sights could send her back to the war. It was never far from her mind, never a moment in which she was fully free of the horrors she had witnessed. She ran her hand through her tangled long hair, trying to calm herself. _It’s the past. You survived and lived. It isn’t now, and now is what matters. Kaidan loves you, and you love him. You’re together, and seven and a half months pregnant. Think about those things, leave the war behind._

It didn’t always work. Sometimes her hands would shake so badly that the cup of coffee she was holding clattered to the ground with a sharp sound. Coffee would scald her hand, and she didn’t notice.

That was what the war had done, and she was tired of being its prisoner. She turned the taps off, and reached for her towel, still breathing hard. It was going to be an awful, hellish morning. Yet she knew that she had to break free of this fog, this state of permanent misery where she still wondered if she was just a VI program that thought she was Commander Rose Shepard of the SSV Normandy SR-2. She walked into the bedroom, wishing for the days where she didn’t worry about her outfits, where she wore combat fatigues and heavy armour, and nobody criticised her. Her body felt ungainly, and the flurry of kicks was a reminder that she had lived beyond the time and place she had expected. If truth was told, she had been ready to die when she saw the star-kid. But instead, she had lived.

It was that constant struggle in herself that caused her the most grief. A part of her had died in the closed, cramped keeper tunnel, and she could never get that back. Her humanity was intact but a piece of her had died that day. Shepard could never tell Kaidan that. He wouldn’t understand.

She stood for a while in front of the mirror, her towel all but forgotten as she stared at her body. The two grey-green eyes that met her own seemed old, with the years of an Asari matriarch behind them, and not her own thirty-five years. The swelling ankles, the scars which crisscrossed her belly like road maps, hinted at the life that she would have. Diapers, and sleepless nights, and a precious life to hold close in her arms and sing songs to. The childhood she had been deprived of, as a kid on the streets who joined the Alliance Navy to escape the destitution which had informed her choices. This child would know only love and affection, supportive parents, and above all, a world to live in. She reached for her maxi-dress, slipping it over her head and tugging it down. She brushed her hair, and wove it back into a braid, before pinning it up in a bun. A lifetime in the military had taught her well.

“Kaidan,” she called, wishing she could see her feet to do her shoes up.

“Yes, Rose?” He called back, turning his attention away from the bacon which sizzled and exploded in the pan. The sound of frying bacon was a pleasure, a reminder of the good things in life.

“Can’t see my feet, send help. Commander Shepard is a beached whale in need of an evac,” she called back, smiling for the first time that morning. Her smiles were rare— even in their wedding photos, she hadn’t smiled. The pain had been still too raw then, the grief for those they had lost impinging on the so-called “happiest day of her life”. Kaidan caught her smile now, and he smiled back that beautiful warm smile which had made her fall in love with him.

“Why don’t you just wear your flip-flops?” He asked her, but bent to put her feet into her black marine boots, lacing them up just enough to support her ankles. 

“My feet can’t stand them, and I waddle enough as it is. I don’t want to look even more like an Elcor, which is what I will look like if I wear those silly things.” There was more to it than that, and they both knew it. After fourteen years in the navy, old habits died hard. Kaidan kissed his Shepard, and for a moment, things were good. There was no grim spectre lurking in the background, waiting to steal their happy moment. There was no reminder of the friends that weren’t around. Their baby kicked her hard in the diaphragm, and she winced.

“She knows how to ruin a moment, this little one,” Shepard sighed. “I think she knows we’re naming her after another moment-ruiner.”

“What, we’re naming her Joker now? What happened to Ash?” Kaidan’s smile vanished remembering what had happened to Ashley. It seemed so unfair that it had come down to an impossible choice, the choice of who to leave behind. He often felt guilt that he had lived— survivor’s guilt was a powerful thing. “But I guess it’s the least we can do, given that you destroyed Joker’s girlfriend,”

“Don’t joke, please. Not about that.” Her tone was sad, and he felt awful for a moment. “Joker’s happiness was destroyed, because of that awful choice I made. The choice to destroy synthetic life. I can’t live with that choice, Kaidan.” It would take a lifetime to forgive herself. She knew that, as did he.

“You acted with integrity, and that’s all that matters,” he said, rubbing her back gently, thumbs tracing concentric circles idly.

“Does that really justify it?” She sighed, and reached across the space to kiss him— to know that she wasn’t a broken person in a glued-up world, and that she wasn’t alone. Because she wasn’t.

It was time for them to go, to go outside and face the sunshine. Breakfast was eaten, the kitchen tidied. She got her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders, and Kaidan beside her. She could face the outside world with him at her side, for he was the one she clung to when her nightmares were night terrors, and she woke drenched in sweat. With Kaidan, the dark and dismal dreams faded into monochrome grey, and the warm light of dawn broke over the horizon. With what they had seen, it was no wonder they clung together in the dark and prayed that they would live to see another day.


End file.
